General Principles
Yesterday, on a discussion list, I wrote about the huge gaps I have seen between theory and practice in physics. Specifically, I talked about the type of physics called "QED," which addresses how quantum effects work in the realm of electrons, protons, neutrons and electromagnetism. When I ran the "QMHP" research area at NSF, I had a chance to observe the greatest empirical work in the world in experimental research into those areas, but now I see huge gaps between that realm and the beliefs about quantum mechanics and physics which most people assume today. Based on what I saw at NSF, I believe that better understanding of QED physics is the most important challenge open to rigorous, fundamental physics today
In the realm of soul and spirit, I see a similar gap. Many people have talked about the gap between people's BELIEFS and people's ACTIONS. Many of us believe that prayer or meditation are important ACTIONS they take in their spiritual life. This morning, in my own daily morning meditation, I see more clearly how we need to state and remember some basic principles.
Faith and Practice In My Life
Forty years ago, I decided to join a local Quaker Meeting, affiliated with Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM), which has strong ties both with Friends General Conference (FGC) and Friends United Meeting (FUM). To create a kind of social contract or agreement, to allow diverse people to work together, they agree on an official document (updated at times) called "Faith and Practice." Some people come because of what they believe, their Faith. Others, like me, come because of practice. We all try to work together, positively, for many reasons, but I came for practice.
When I travel to Asia, I often say: "If I lived in your nation, I probably would affiliate with a different religious institution. This wasn't a declaration of what my beliefs are, which I state in my papers. It was a choice of practice. Practice usually requires that we connect with other people. There are churches in the US who follow great practices, but with FGC Quakers I am not making a false declaration about my beliefs." At http://www.werbos.com/
LCD: A Core Practice
Yesterday in our local Quaker "Meeting for Worship", I summarized what the three real pillars are of our practice: an emanation of light, like an "LCD" light. (It is OK to smile in Quaker meetings, and many did at this point.) L for Listening, C for Connection, and D for discernment.
None of these are things we just hear about in kindergarten, and then forget. None of these are things any human can claim to have mastered completely.
[Exactly after I typed that sentence, and settled down to a breakfast of Dahi yogurt and blueberries, I decided to listen to the background. What popped was a video on eco India. That fits my message and practice so well I have to add it!!! But it appeared directly on DW,
and this nay not be exactly the right choice: Eco India - The Environment Magazine | Eco India | DW | 02.07.2021]
All of us humans are challenged to learn better and better how to do better on these three keys, the L and the C and the D. "This year," I said yesterday, "C is especially prominent. Many of us have been challenged to upgrade our skills in making spiritual connection. Our very lives are powered by those spiritual connections. We depend on C for our very life! " [No, the life in our physical body will not just disappear if that cuts out, but I for one expect I would suffer from "failure to thrive" if the daily infusion of light, life and love should be cut off.]
In all three areas, we are called to push as hard as we can, but no harder, to strengthen and exercise the skill. If we push as hard as we can, as in strenuous physical exercise, we will feel some pain, some growing pains and some confusion. Thus we are also called to learn more and more self awareness and self control to prevent negative irrational reactive emotions which could confuse and misdirect us. We are all called to do this, here and now....
[This was our first "hybrid meeting", with many of us in the meeting house and many shown as Zoom images on the wall. I did not comment on that example, visible in plain sight, but after the silent period we certainly discussed it.]
I was very silent before I stood up and spoke that message. I had hoped others would voice the thought (as they often did at previous times, with previous thoughts). In silent meditation, I had tried to reach out to higher intelligence and ask for explanations of some points.... including many aspects and examples of connections on my mind.
MORNING AFTER
Almost every day, I begin by trying to attain the highest level of "meditation" I am capable of, trying to connect better with the noosphere, the cosmos, the Spirit of the Deep. This was when I was more able to listen to the response of higher intelligence to the questions I projected out there so hard at Meeting yesterday.
As always, the complexity of what came from higher intelligence, and my own brain and soul, and the other inputs we have access to, is far too great to do justice to even in a long blog post. I remembered how I now have to get used to the idea that many of my most important thoughts can only be voiced at that level, going to the noosphere and others that way, simply because there is too much and too many to fit in narrower channels like this computer.
An exercise
As part of this session, I was reminded of a very great Zen exercise (a Practice!), which I performed often and respect deeply even though I am shocked by some of the dangerous false Beliefs of Bodhidharma.
That exercise begins with a type of exercise familiar to many schools of Western mysticism and yoga: focus your whole awareness in this part of your body. (Foot? heart? Solar plexus?Upper head? A few inches above it? A cloud a few feet away?) BE there in that place. Feel what you feel when you locate your whole awareness there. Then shift...
BUT THEN the Zen script asks: "WHO is doing the focusing? Who is looking first to one place and then to the next? No, do not just turn around, keep looking forward but FEEL back, and feel deep, to WHO is doing the looking."
This morning, it became like the same thing at a higher level. I can meditate and feel awareness from my personal viewpoint, my own personal self or soul. I try to gate with higher intelligence, to try to share some of what it offers in the gating activity, and see what life feels like from its point of view more than I do in normal everyday life. And then suddenly: I can see through my own self soul... and the other within limits... but there is value in coming back to the... Self?... which can switch perspectives.
More thoughts
There are practical concrete schisms between parts of our noosphere, the cosmos and our very best efforts to understand the ultimate truths. These were major themes this morning.
One theme was LCD, and prayer. Some friends are very serious about listening (to perceive) and praying (to send out a request).
Some would meditate hard on the question: "What does "God" (higher intelligence) really want, and how can I make sense of and fit with his or her plan?"
So look at it visually. We can try to exchange information, to input (listen) or output (request or articulate), either to our external environment or to our body. These are all important aspects of practice. But there is also information to the buffer, to a shared information space between us and higher intelligence, essential to our hope of seeing an honest answer to the very tricky kinds of questions I was posing yesterday.
I also remembered the good old oracle of Delphi: a practice where people did not only request favors, but requested insight or information. Failure to ask the right question often leads to endless confusion, at all levels of life!!!
Long, long ago, I understood that the "plans" of a higher order intelligence would be too complicated to state clearly and reliably to lower levels of intelligence. Even in good Quaker Meetings, we expect some people to be guided in one direction, and others in others. The Meeting urges people not to confuse personal, current leadings with guidance which everyone would benefit from. But if we develop our intelligence, our arsenal of universal concepts and representations, and our flexibility, we can serve as better channels of a more accurate understanding, updated every day, and thus be more energized.
This does not require that we give up our personal human values and feelings, but by working with the bigger tide we have a much better chance of getting where we really prefer to go: a Pareto optimum. (This has some relation to the old Rosicrucian version of Alychymical marriage.)
When they asked me "Are you a person of the book?", I still say, "Yes, the book by Von Neumann and Morgenstern" (as interpreted and explained on my web pages, as best I can, always in need of update and explanation).
When they asked me "Are you a person of the book?", I still say, "Yes, the book by Von Neumann and Morgenstern" (as interpreted and explained on my web pages, as best I can, always in need of update and explanation).
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Later that day:
In yesterday's message, I stressed that we are called to reach out more and better, but NOT to erode our own core spiritual connections and foundations.
For example, when we reach out to the left of us, we can also reach out to the right of us, and even help improve connections between left and right! After all, we are all part of the same noosphere. That is who we really are, even when we try to listen to the cosmos and the night sky!
Like neurons inside a brain, we, inside the noosphere of this solar system, live or die based on our connections to others in that noosphere, and to the noosphere itself.
A few weeks ago, one of the BLM people urged us to resist "perfectionism." Yes, we need to connect better with people who cannot afford to spend energy on details we might feel obliged to address ourselves. But many of us also need to remember the need to connect better with people like those who truly appreciate higher mathematics. This week was especially challenging for me personally, as I learned to respect more fully their need for connection, as we need to work out workable details for challenges like the internet of the future. Without getting those details right, we might well all die. I am very deeply grateful to them for their patience as I struggle with this.
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Next day: (Tuesday, 7/13/21)
From the voice of Loki: "Ask not what God wants. Ask how much he is willing to pay for it." Wild as this sounds, it may have a lot more truth in it than most people are willing to face up to. ALL intelligent systems, from brains to noospheres to systems of collective intelligence -- even universal optimizers based on Lagrange-Euler equations -- are governed in the end by tradeoffs. Some of us have seen things which might be viewed as miracles, but they are never free, even if the price is in a different level of economy. This is an aspect of what it means that our souls are parts of a larger system.
It reminds me of how I adapted to working at NSF, learning to live within budget constraints as painlessly and efficiently as possible, still focusing on the big goals at stake.
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And next: 7/14/21
In morning meditation, as in Quaker Meeting, some messages are really meant for everyone (to be transmitted and discussed later by whatever mix of channels works). The one today was mainly for a few people, like me
and part of my family, though logically it has some connection to everyone.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when I lived in Maryland with children in the house, I often thought of "This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter..." Different morning meditation periods, and different days seemed to have different themes, fitting the old image of this whole world as a school.
This post started with LCD, letters important to all of us. EVERY soul in this noosphere connects to others, like neurons in a brain, and our very lives depend on the exchange of "energy" and information with other neurons, connecting us to all different parts of the noosphere. But, just as different cells in the brain tend to learn different pieces of information, and develop different connections (some longer-distance, some shorter), some of us put special weight on one aspect of C which I glossed over quickly above:
the aspect of learning universal concepts or representations which strengthen connection and strengthen our value to higher intelligence (noosphere, cosmos, spirit of the deep).
So for me this morning, the letter U for understanding or unique plays a central role. [oops: TODAY these ae the "U" in play. But there is another U, Von Neumann's cardinal utility function, which is just as important. For another time of day.]
My experiences as a program director at NSF 1988-2015 are still of such great value to me in expanding and organizing my own understanding! For example, in my first week, as I set up a review pane to do justice to certain advanced proposals and thinking, I felt a huge reaction which I will never forget: "I have been worrying so much about the world having too many people. [Yes, it still does, in numerical terms.] But when I need to find the people who can really understand THIS aspect, and THAT aspect, and THIS central issue of global importance... it seems as if there are not enough of us! People with unique understanding (UU) are so essential to the health of science, of truth, and of the noosphere itself! I often feel I can "see" a kind of hidden tree or network of those very special souls, past and future, connecting key ideas and insights necessary to really integrate anyone's understanding. Lately, those people are often unknown to 99% or 99.999% of humanity, or grossly misunderstood if known, but important to integrate.
But this blog is not the time/place to name names, even though they figure prominently in my last few days. Even though I woke up from an assumption dream where a powerful and enlightened person had to revise plans (we all do!!) do to a U U aspect he had not really known or accounted for, not about me...
But I CAN repeat a useful lesson I learned at NSF, which I often recall and relive.
"In this information economy, many of us are knowledge workers of one kind or another.
There are three essential duties of ANY knowledge worker: to input, to output, and process or add value in creating new knowledge. ALL THREE are ESSENTIAL and NECESSARY for everyone, and the total value is roughly the product of the three." Some were better at
one of the three than others; diversity was crucial, such as connections between those creating new ideas or technologies and those better at education and passing them on.
That applies both in our mundane information economy and in the noosphere itself!
